H4 Lab

H4 Lab designs embedded electronic subsystems for humanoid robots and physical artificial intelligence systems. Its products are inertial measurement units and EtherCAT communication boards, along with sensing and safety electronics and engineering services: research and development, electrical design and embedded software. The company serves startups, research labs and system integrators.

The company's website starts from one observation: the hardware needed to build a humanoid robot cannot be found off the shelf. A team that needs it has to put together real-time sensing and communication on its own. The company's material names three obstacles: integration complexity, hard access to EtherCAT and the limits of the available sensors.

The product

The team is designing plug-and-play modules that handle real-time communication, and work in the lab as well as in industrial settings. The hardware is compact and built for the move from prototype to production. The customer keeps the design of its robot; H4 Lab's modules handle sensing and the link with the rest of the system.

What it changes in practice

• A robotics team wires real-time communication without developing its own EtherCAT stack, because the modules arrive ready to plug in.
• The same module serves on the test bench and on the production machine, because it is designed for both environments.
• Hardware no longer delays the start of a project, because the sensing and communication subsystems are already in the catalogue.

Adding electrons into your projects!